Arjun Kapoor, the ‘star kid’ of the lesser famous Kapoor clan, whose father, uncles, cousins, step mother and step siblings have all been part of the tinsel town, in his recent interview with Bollywood gossip website ‘Bollywood Hungama’ said that the film industry people need to come together to end the boycott trend. “We have stayed silent for too long and thought our work will speak for itself,” he said. He added that now ‘people are used to’ making the boycott calls and the hashtags that run are far from reality.
Arjun Kapoor made his debut in film ‘Ishaqzaade’, which romanticised inter-faith marriage, and has failed to register a memorable hit till now. He claimed that the boycott calls are part of ‘agenda’ and refuses to address the elephant in the room that is poorly scripted movies that seem to be based on Hinduphobia coupled with unremarkable performances by those who identify themselves as actors only because their parents were one.
Kapoor further claimed that the shine of the film industry has come down over past few years because they (film industry people) didn’t do much and ‘allowed’ muck be thrown at them. The Bollywood Hungama host Faridoon Shahryar then claims that certain television channels have made a lot of money just by defaming the film industry, to which Kapoor said that ‘nothing sells like show business’.
Shahryar and Kapoor then claim that the boycott call for Aamir Khan’s film Laal Singh Chaddha and the flak Ranveer Singh drew for his nude photoshoot is a ‘distraction’, but ‘it should not take away from the industry the respect it deserves’, Kapoor says. However, Kapoor does concede that the work produced by Hindi film industry has not been good and said that the industry first needs to fix the quality of work it brings on table for audience. He does assert towards the end that nothing can beat better quality films.
Kapoor’s interview comes close on the heels of much anticipated big budget films like Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chaddha and Akshay Kumar’s Raksha Bandhan which have tanked at the box office miserably. While many netizens have claimed the films had weak opening because of the boycott calls made for the films owing to the Hinduphobic nature of people associated with the films, critics have also noted that the films were badly made and were more like an assault on sensibilities of the audience which is why the films likely tanked. The films, Laal Singh Chaddha especially, has been a disaster at the box office.
